Mrz 29 2006
On Social Software and its Acceptance
After my PhD, I decided that I wanted to do something new and interesting, and I found that the combination of Social Software with Semantic Web technology would be a worthwhile research topic. The great response for the SemWiki workshop supports this decision. In my current position at Salzburg Research, it is now my job to discuss possible projects with industrial partners.
While technology companies are in general very open towards community technologies and concepts like wikis, weblogs, citizen journalism, etc., content providers are often not very open to user participation and rather stick with their centralised content creation. Today, I thought a little about this issue and realised that one problem might be that content providers are afraid of errors in the content. They often argue that they need to ensure a proper quality and the community will deliver something not as good.
I seriously question this attitude:
- First, errors are acceptable, because there is no single truth and the world is full of errors; instead, we need to tolerate and build systems that tolerate errors.
- Second, the community knows actually more than every individual, as has been stated in this recent book whose German title is “Die Weisheit der Vielen”
Of course, there is more to this discussion than these points, and there might be other issues besides being afraid for errors. Perhaps I’ll discuss them when I have some more time in the future.:-)
